Carissa is a History PhD student and teaching assistant at the Univeristy of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research seeks to recover the experiences of belonging and exclusion felt by people of mixed African and South Asian heritage in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda 1940-1970, who are known locally as “chotara”.
From September 2020 to June 2021, Carissa undertook
an equalities, diversity and inclusion internship at the National Library of Scotland, where she engaged in policy work and reviewed the institution’s descriptive practices relating to protected characteristics. She founded the
Cultural Heritage Terminology Network and initiated a collaborative terminology glossary project that offers guidance for cultural heritage professionals on how to address harmful and discriminatory language.
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Carissa completed her MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge in July 2020 after graduating with a First Class MA with Honours in English Literature & History from the University of Edinburgh. In 2019, her prize-winning student essay ‘
The Ant as Metaphor: Orientalism, Imperialism and Myrmecology’ was published in the
Archives of Natural History .